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Scarlet and India.
Does O'Donnell know, Rhett wondered as he waited impatiently for Mercy to silence her panic-stricken child. Does India O’Donnell know?
Not unless Benson told her, Rhett reasoned. Nobody else in the world would know—perhaps not even Scarlet, who was dead now anyway.
Which means O’Donnell doesn’t know, Rhett assured himself.
Because Benson wouldn’t have told her.
And she couldn’t possibly remember.
36
She remembers.
The thought tore through Ice’s brain as he tore through the streets of Mumbai chasing the sobbing screaming stumbling woman who was trying to run away from something inside her, inside not just her mind but her body, the memories coming from psychic spaces within her physical being, where they’d been trapped in muscle and tissue, bone and marrow, ligaments and sinews, recorded not in the folds of her brain’s memory banks but in the spaces between her body’s organs, written in the blood that pumped through her veins.
Ice swore he could feel Indy’s trauma in his own body. In this LSD-induced heightened state of hyper-awareness, Ice’s own physical consciousness had responded to Indy’s with sympathetic vibrations, relational resonance, spiritual synchronicity, cosmic connection, quantum fucking entanglement.
Were those his parents’ thoughts or his own?
“Indy!” Ice shouted as he worked his way up to full speed, hurdling over a bewildered stray dog, dodging a grinning street urchin. His boots hammered the dusty pavement, the dull throb of where she’d kicked him in the groin making every step vibrate through his aching balls. “Indy, stop, damn it!”
She’d stopped screaming, but only because she was running so hard her lungs couldn’t handle everything at once. Thankfully she had to slow to turn the corner from their mostly deserted side-street onto the more crowded main road, and Ice turned on the jets and lunged forward, grabbing her by the elbow and managing to pull her back into the quiet side-street before the entire city got them on camera.
“Hey, it’s me, Indy, stop, please, dammit,stop!” he whisper-shouted against her face, wrapping both arms around her to stop her flailing fists from getting him on the nose again, prevent her kicking legs from tormenting his throbbing balls any further. “Indy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry for forcing you to look at that photo.”
“No, you’re not!” she hissed through gritted teeth before opening her mouth and snapping at his nose like she wanted to bite it off. “Let me go. I’m fucking losing my mind, Ice. Let go of me or I’ll start screaming again and someone will call the police and—”
Ice shut her up with a palm flat across her mouth. He pulled her away from the main road, back down the side-street, ducking out of sight into the recessed doorway of a shuttered store. “You scream and we’re both screwed, Indy. They might have already discovered Scarlet, for all we know. We need to get the hell out of here. Look at me, Indy.” He turned her face upwards, keeping his hand across her mouth, pressing hard so she couldn’t bare her teeth and bite him like the animal she’d turned into as her body released what Ice sensed were memories of violence from so early in her life that they were recorded in every cell of her writhing twisting roiling wrenching flesh. “Indy, open your eyes. Look at me.”
But she couldn’t open her eyes, wouldn’t open her eyes, was thrashing like a wild beast caught in some trap and trying to get loose. Ice himself was stretched to the limits of his own sanity, and he knew they had to get out of there ASAP.
The main road was getting more crowded. Curious passers-by were glancing in their direction. Some of them looked alarmed to see a big muscled man clearly holding a woman against her will, hand clamped across her mouth, arms controlling her wild struggles to break free. Ice figured he had maybe a few minutes before someone found a street-cop and sent him over to investigate.
And that would not end well—not for any of them, cop included.
Ice had to make a choice, and make it quick.
So with his hand still clamped firmly over her mouth, Ice snaked his other hand around her waist and in one swift silent move heaved her struggling snarling snapping body back to their waiting escape-pod.
The blue Honda’s front grill seemed to be frowning at Ice as he got closer with his captive. “Don’t look at me like that,” Ice snarled at the car, which was glowing bright blue, its iridescent body pulsing like a beast breathing in accusatory anger. “Or we’ll take a different car and you’re going to sit here alone and dusty, grumpy that you missed out on a grand adventure.”
Indy bit his fingers just then, forcing Ice to reflexively pull his hand off her mouth.
Big mistake.
She was too far gone to be rational, her body surging with too many chemicals of both flight and fight, fear and ferocity, anger and anguish. She howled like a wounded hyena, and although Ice managed to get his bloody fingers clamped over her mouth again, he knew they were dangerously close to being discovered by some curious resident from the surrounding buildings. Thankfully the stores were still shuttered and the apartment windows still closed, with those noisy air-conditioning units merrily chugging away in the humid Mumbai air. But this wasn’t a sustainable location, sure as hell wasn’t a sustainable situation.
Ice didn’t have time to calm Indy down right now—hell, he wasn’t even sure if she could be calmed down. She was out of her damn mind, and Ice knew she was going to be hard to control as her body released what had been coiled into its cells for thirty years.
So how the hell was he going to get them to the airport?
Ice himself was going to need every ounce of mental focus just to drive in this compromised state without killing them both along with half of Mumbai—not to mention navigate his way there using a map on that tiny flip-phone while hallucinating on LSD.
He sure as hell couldn’t drive with Indy trying to claw his eyes out or leap from a moving car or stick her head out the window and scream bloody murder or some unpredictable combination of all those things. There was no way a psychedelic clown-car was making it to the airport through Mumbai traffic with a screaming woman who was repeatedly being restrained by a wide-eyed red-faced muscle-bound madman.
Not even the CIA’s legendary use of plausible deniability could render that scenario even vaguely plausible, even close to deniable.